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The tunnels were always cold. Sometimes it was just an unpleasant chill, a draft that swept up through doorways and set the unprepared occupant shivering, but overall wasn't a huge nuisance. Other times, however, when the unrelenting, freezing rain beat against the mountaintop, it was almost unbearable. The stone floors and walls were frigid. Breathing produced clouds, water in the pipes slowed to a crawl, trap-lanterns wilted and slept, and the cheeses juddered and whistled on their shelves. If they had Faces, they would have been angry beyond belief.
Neverfell remembered these days not quite as fondly as the rest, if "fond" was the right word for it. Walking through the dark, out of clock, wrapped in a cloak that was never quite enough to block the chill, felt like a strange space between dreaming and waking, living and dying.
Most of their energy on these days was dedicated to ensuring their charges didn't detonate, or fly away, or mist the room with poisonous spores, or any other ghastly means of aggression. She managed to keep plenty warm for a time, running back and forth to soothe the dairy products. In the interim, she paced and shivered and asked after something to do, and all the while her mind was cradled by that purple coil of smoke, the feeling of broken petals under her feet, and the smell of wind. She had learned to hold her tongue about these thoughts, bubbling and bursting just beneath her pale skin, lest she talk ad nauseum once she had begun.
But despite her Master's insistence that she not let this distract her, or that she forget them altogether, these thoughts comforted her through the long, dark, lonely hours.
Leaving Caverna altogether was an entirely different beast. One that Neverfell didn't mind at all. She and her friends had worked long and hard for their freedom, and they were going to enjoy it.
It was everything she had ever hoped, and more. Endlessly tall, so bright, and so, so warm. Even in the dark, late at night (though she was not out of clock, for this particular annoyance seemed to disappear on the surface), when she stared out her window and into sky, it was warm and bright. Millions upon millions of little dots shining down on her, just like in Caverna.
But this time they seemed to shine just for her.